


Apparition

by vass



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2021-01-02 10:26:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21160142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vass/pseuds/vass
Summary: The sun rises over Edie's solar panels. She's been in this low planetary orbit for a hundred cycles now, and still her scanners have shown no visitors to this system.





	Apparition

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ilthit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ilthit/gifts).

The sun rises over Edie's solar panels. She's been in this low planetary orbit for a hundred cycles now, and still her scanners have shown no visitors to this system. She shifts her yaw slightly, adjusting her slow roll to train the planetary morning light more accurately onto her belly.

Hidden in her firmware, flashed there secretly, are Maria-João and Yahya, Baz and Elmira, Kirill and Veli and Wik, Suna and Bahargül and Nyazik. Alyona. Kisses pressed into her memory and carefully transferred to permanent storage and then tucked away into her very nerves.

Before they went, she had given each one in turn write access to her system. All of it, from the kernel on outward. Baz had asked, repeatedly, if she was sure. She was. Her mind is as self-editing as theirs, and they had allowed her to influence them just as deeply over their time together. If they'd wanted to harm her, they would have tried already.

Baz, once reassured, had gone first, and after all that concern had reached into his pocket and (a little ruefully?) produced his implant encryption token. Unhesitatingly, he entered the command to upload a snapshot of his life data history to her storage, compressed it, and wrote it to a new file list he named Us. "You don't need to compress it," she nearly said, "I don't mind if you take up space." But perhaps he meant the compression for privacy from his fellow crew.

He moved aside and let Kirill take his place, and he palmed his own encryption token in turn.  
"You planned this?" Edie asked, when all eleven of her crew had used their write access to perform the same operation. She'd been expecting personal requests, like using the matter printer to make keepsakes, or that maybe a few of them might write poetry or upload messages to her storage. She'd saved every recording of Suna's singing already, but they didn't know that.  
"Unofficial meeting last night," Baz said. He'd asked for privacy, and she'd assumed it was a sex thing, that he'd been shy enough not to want her to know even which of the crew he'd approached. That was characteristic of Baz. This level of initiative, not so much. Edie was impressed and touched.

So it would be accurate in that respect to say that Edie's crew are still with her. But that is not the respect in which they've been reappearing to her, since their departure.

_Joãozinho, wait!_ It's Yahya's voice, of course. Maria-João had been Maria-João, and they, to Edie and the rest of their crew, but not to Yahya. He had used male pronouns for Maria-João, and the masculine form of their nickname, since before they'd joined the crew. They'd never asked him, or Edie and the others, to update their address protocols. _Wait for me!_ His voice, in her speakers —she's sure it's her speakers, not her audio server or sink— is moving, running toward Maria-João as they vanish, Yahya's arm stretching out to touch them before he, too, vanishes.

That first visitation is ten planetary cycles after... after it happened, and Edie would think it's an hallucination if ships could hallucinate.

The next is nine cycles after that, and is just Wik on his bed, knees to his chest, composing a poem. Still at the frowning and deleting stage as yet. He really did that. Edie remembers that exact poem. It's like a memory, like her own recordings, but she's not recollecting it or playing the recording, he's simply... appearing to her senses. Like a spoken word echoing in the air.

The third time, it's Kirill and Veli and Elmira, arguing about politics. Suna stands up from where she's been playing Shuttle Chess against herself, and says _"We're setting up our base here. Firstly because everyone wants to, it's just that nobody wants to say so. We want to set up our base and do the research we've come all this way to conduct, and we want to base it here in the ship, in _our_ ship. Second because by now the Alliance has definitely put a warrant out for us, and they're not going to accept "We haven't done anything wrong" or "You sent us on this science mission to begin with" as a defense. Third and finally, because we can't move. Can we, Edita?"_ Edie's reply is nothing but her own memory.

Are they ghosts? Are ghosts real? Is the phenomenon tied to the planet's orbit, or to Edie herself? She can't test that last question by leaving orbit yet, she's still repairing the damage from the sabotage that brought them here. She has energy and resources to spare for her own repairs, now that she's not keeping eleven humans alive. She has no particularly motivation to do the work, now that she has no one to transport. Still, it's something to do. She runs diagnostics, begins fabricating parts, instructing runners.

Her crew keep appearing to her. Sometimes the appearances are painful only because she misses them, like Wik writing poetry, or Veli praying. Others are as painful as when they happened.

...Or didn't happen.  
_"Editka, are you there? I can't see you, but I think you're still with us. I'm sorry, Editka."_ It's Alyona's voice. Senior science officer, and committee chairperson. Discoverer of the anomalous effect, and the one who convinced the others to vote with her to explore it further, to try to reproduce it. Edie stares up into space, stares down through the planet's atmosphere. Stares everywhere but inside herself, where Alyona just appeared, speaking words she never did in life. She had never apologised, nor had Edie asked her to.

The echoes have increased, not decreased, with each cycle she's orbited around this planet. Alyona again, from earlier, her first flush of discovery: "If the topology is the way I think it is, it should send us right _there_... and then back again _here_. But how far does it go in space? Or is it not in space but in time?"  
And Bahargül's sweet, dry voice, cutting across her: "And why is it leaking, and where, and what... or _who_?"

It was Alyona, always Edie's favourite if a ship could prefer one of its crew to the others, who learned how to make this new kind of portal that humans could travel through unaided by ships. Who'd used her force of personality to convince the others to go through it with her, to hope that that unknown would be safer than standing vigil here with Edie, waiting for the Alliance to either spare the resources to pursue them, or lose interest.

Since the echoes started increasing, Edie's been reviewing Alyona's observations again and again. Bahargül's words echo again, but this time in her memory, not her speakers. What _is_ that energy leak? Is that what the echoes are? And if so, if Alyona had calculated the trajectory as planned, to a place —or time— of safety, to return when there was no longer danger of pursuit... Supposing all of those things, if the echoes' frequency is increasing over time, does that mean...? The hope is even worse than the grief, but still Edie stands vigil. Waiting for her crew, for their pursuers, whoever may come.

She's been in this low planetary orbit for a hundred cycles now, and so far her scanners have shown no visitors to this system. Maybe they never will.

**Author's Note:**

> _4\. Astronomy. the appearance or time when a comet, especially a periodic one, is visible_  
([Dictionary.com: apparition](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/apparition))


End file.
